September 2012
1 post
Blog announcement
Greetings Blogosphere.
Quick announcement. For a while now I’ve been maintaining 2 blogs that serve very similar purposes with ever so slightly different focuses. The Pippapotamus has been for articles whilst Girl Under Duvet has been a blog about my battle with ME and auto-immune thyroid disease.
So from now on all ME etc related things will be moving over to The Pippapotamus - Enjoy!
August 2012
2 posts
Websites For Dog Days
This has been a really good week. It’s been a hard week, but I finally got back to the pool for the first time in almost 9 months. When in the pool I just floated a bit, but it felt incredible. I used to do long distance swimming and it was ‘my’ sport. Hours and days have been lost in water and so it felt like a big hurdle to get back to it. I’m a walrus compared to my old...
10 tags
July 2012
1 post
June 2012
1 post
Chronic fatigue syndrome eased by cancer drug →
An anti-cancer drug could hold the key to treating chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS). Symptoms of the disease eased in 10 of 15 patients given rituximab, an anti-lymphoma drug.
May 2012
1 post
3 tags
April 2012
4 posts
4 tags
6 tags
Run up to ME Awareness Day and We Are Cardiff
This week I wrote a piece for ME/CFS awareness day (to be published for May 12th) for the fabulous website We Are Cardiff. It has been a very personal undertaking to help try and increase awareness and education of the disease and I will share with you the story as soon as it’s been blogged. I was also lucky enough to have my photo taken by Mr Adam Chard / Croatoan Design for the blog piece – one...
Symptoms 101 →
Some Facts You Should Know →
Some interesting (US-based) factoids… such as
“Myalgic Encephalomyelitis/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome is a disabling neuroimmune disease that affects more Americans than AIDS, breast cancer and lung cancer combined; more people than have multiple sclerosis or cystic fibrosis; a disease where patients are more functionally impaired than those suffering from diabetes, heart failure and...
March 2012
11 posts
“M.E. is a chronic illness affecting 250,000 people in the UK.”
– Action for ME
Never too early to start plugging for ME awareness... →
May 12th is ME/CFS Awareness day. Please support by simply educating yourself on the illness and maybe tweeting/facebooking a link or two to encourage your friends to do the same.
ME - Not a Modern Folly
My thoughts of the day. Many people believe ME/CFS to be a modern illness born from resistance to antibiotics/superbugs and other such like. It is fascinating when you study the history and trace back ideas and evidence of the poor poor people suffering from the disease before it was recognised. I feel antibiotics didn’t invent the disease but helped make it less fatal. ME makes your immune system...
Up to Date
So that just about brings us up to date - March 2012, 2 years later. A lot has happened. I won’t try to bore you with the details. I just feel that there is too much not being said and not being done not to keep trying to get some kind of extra support and words out there in the ether.
Po'Mo Cripples!
MONDAY, 10 MAY 2010
Cripple!
Last week I went to a gig with my darling fiance, let’s call him J. I am shuffling around with the aid of a stick at the moment and needed to find a chair once inside. Obviously these are not ideal gig-going circumstances - especially for a sold out venue as I spent most of the set staring at the back of people’s heads as they were thrown around with...
Archive: Good Day Bad Day (NB Not steve lamacq...
FRIDAY, 30 APRIL 2010
Good Day Bad Day (NB This is not steve lamacq related!)
Today I experienced both the good and the truly awful in society. First the bad, which is the way I would choose the running order to be - the night is darkest before the dawn and all that. When I was leaving the pool after managing my first swim this week a man saw me get into my car, which was parked in a disabled...
Another one from the archive
THURSDAY, 29 APRIL 2010
Graded Exercise - one of the triad of recommended treatments. My thoughts
Here’s an excerpt from an email I recently sent to a friend who is about to start graded exercise therapy… “I was always very sceptical and threatened by the idea of graded exercise and so I wanted to tell you my experience of it in case you were feeling the same. Sorry if this...
A little bit of History
MONDAY, 26 APRIL 2010
A short history of My ME
I chose this time to start my blog over any other year in my illness because I have recently had a serious relapse - my worst in 3 years. Relapses are a sharp kick in the balls for anyone with ME because they negate any progress you feel you have made. I had begun to think I was perhaps getting better properly, steadily but surely taking on...
Intro
So to get things started, in 2010 I wrote an ME blog, much of which I was really proud of. So, the first few posts of this blog are going to be my favourite picks as they introduce the illness in my words how I wanted to in the first place. Here’s the first…
SUNDAY, 25 APRIL 2010
First things first… ME what?
The most obvious starting place is to go back to basics and catch...
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Welcome
So, here it is. This blog has been years in the making. I have hesitated many times over how to go about it. I have had other blogs under this name, and the posts will be transported here, but they peetered out as it’s difficult to keep momentum or find the right tone for this kind of thing.
Few first hand accounts of anyone suffering from ME exist (they are usually written by the carers)...
